A blog all about food, and the other things that keep our lives full.

The August 2010 Daring Cooks’ Challenge was hosted by LizG of Bits n’ Bites and Anula of Anula’s Kitchen. They chose to challenge Daring Cooks to make pierogi from scratch and an optional challenge to provide one filling that best represents their locale.

I decided to stick with a traditional potato and onion filled pierogi. Although super psyched to complete this challenge, I put it off until the last minute thinking that it was going to be a very involved, all day sort of recipe. I was pleasantly surprised by how quickly everything came together and how amazing the final result tasted.

For the filling, I started by preparing two cups of mashed potatoes (I cheated by using instant). To the mashed potatoes I added 1 tsp pepper, 1 tsp salt, and half of an onion chopped and sauteed in butter until just starting to brown.

I used my stand mixer to prepare the pasta dough. I placed two cups of flour in the mixing bowl, added one egg, 1 tsp salt, and slowly added about 1/2 cup water. I let the dough rest for about 30 minutes and then rolled it out super duper thin on a very well floured surface.

I then used a 3in circle cutter to cut the dough and placed 1 Tbsp of filling in the center. I don’t have any of the fancy pants pierogi molds, so I simply pinched the ends together with a fork until thoroughly sealed.

To cook the pierogi, I boiled the pasta until floating on the surface and then pan fried them in butter. They were perfect served with a trace of sour cream!

So Paige and I have been very busy over the last few weeks. Here is the shortened version what’s been going on.

Over a month ago, Paige and I decided it was time to buy our domain name (meaning we would be dropping the “.wordpress.com” from our website address”. We figured while we were doing that, we might change our name since it was never a favorite for either of us and there was another cooking blog with essentially the same name. Then we started thinking about changing the design and lay out. Both of us got completely excited about the prospect of this.

After a lot of discussions, we decided we would each try out our own blog for awhile. We started this blog together because we both wanted to try blogging, we both loved food, and it was safer with a partner. We figured that having someone count on us meant we would actually make our blogging experiment work.

The result – it did work. We are having a bunch of fun. A lot of that fun comes from having such great readers. We have loved all of the feedback we have gotten from you and hope you stick around with us at our new sites. And now, we are both feeling much braver and thought we would take this opportunity to step out on our own.

So – how can you find us? Paige is now located at Saucy and Sweet. And my new blog is Mixin’ Things Up. We will both continue to post recipes but expect to see some new stuff from us as well.